So what is Twitter?

Twitter has suddenly exploded onto the mainstream, why this very morning on a BBC News report from a BBC road show we were told we could follow what was happening on Twitter and Facebook. But what actually is Twitter? Well its micro-blogging et cetera but what does that really mean to the average idiot user? Like me.

To me Twitter, and micro-blogging in general, is what blogging itself started out as. A personal diary, a fast moving record of what was happening. Blogging has evolved though and has become a serious player in citizen journalism. The old lazy stereotype about a blog being a self-obsessed diary of boring details of someone else's life has gone (though some still persist with this accusation, though i doubt they have actually ever read anything like New Wars or John Hawks - two recent finds).

So as blogging has become "serious" then micro-blogging has stepped in and become the place for a fast moving stream of consciousness and things-to-check-out. If i look at my Twitter friends for example (using TwitBin of course, highly recommended for Firefox users) i can read Paul Bradshaw's comments on his Radio WM interview about... er... Twitter, find out the Prime Minister is holding a press conference after meeting the IMF (and wonder if any cheques were handed over), read a link about Starbucks instant coffee and find out one of my friends is finally watching Donnie Darko.

All short and to the point messages. Micro-blogging like blogging itself is evolving of course and the rate of evolution will increase now its hit the big time and it will be very interesting to monitor this. Especially the tension between old-skool tweets about what colour underpants people are wearing and more serious matters. So this is what Twitter means to me, finally. It took some time for me to work it out. But what does Twitter mean to you? Why not leave a comment below?

Using a wiki for a job progress system

Because of the increasing complexity to the on-line presence of the university and the multiple projects that are on-going we have been looking at how best to keep track of jobs and have useful information in a centralised location easily accessible to everyone. We already had a wiki running, powered by Mediawiki, kindly set up for us by ICT but as yet little real use for it. So we are trailing running our Job Progress System on the wiki.

Every job will be assigned a job number and relevant and update information kept on the job as it "travels" through the system. Once the job is completed it will then be archived allowing us to build up a database of completed work for accountability, statistical and historical purposes.

The Sports Centre takes shape

The new Sports Centre, a £7 million complex now being built on the former Ansells Sports Club site next to City North Campus, takes shape. I took this picture at the weekend on a lovely bright and crisp morning. The rabbits running around in between the various piles of construction equipment and materials. Almost poetic.


Full size version here.

View Ancient Rome in Google Earth

You can now view Ancient Rome using Google Earth, or rather a virtual representation. 320CE was a little early for photography, satellites and banks of servers. This, however, makes me think that it would be rather cool to be able to view an area as it changed over time. Of course the amount of imagery you would require would be vast.

Maybe one could have another slider to adjust the area's appearance over time. One could see how a site (such as the university) had changed over time. Such as from this...



To this...



...and to this.

Virtual affair leads to real divorce

A British couple are divorcing after the wife discovered her husband with another woman. Nothing that unusual there of course but the discovery of this illicit liaison was in Second Life. The wife found her husband's online virtual alter-ego "a goatee-bearded, medallion-wearing hombre called Dave Barmy" with a similarly virtual woman. The wife said her husband's affair might be in a virtual world but it was a real affair.

The blurring of the line between the virtual and real-life world is always something that has interested me and i can appreciate her point of view. It might be a situation generated by zeroes and ones but are the thoughts and intentions still the same.

As more of us spend more of our lives in virtual worlds then we need to start considering what laws apply and how. For example (and this is just something that interests me not a query about a possible career change, credit crunch or no credit crunch) if i was to become a prostitute in a virtual world like Second Life and sell sex to other users would that be illegal? Especially in virtual worlds where the virtual currency can be exchanged for real loot. Would it stand up in court? (Sorry couldn't resist!)

A new toy : Twitbin

I have been scathing about Twitter before, wondering exactly what it was for. It's continued popularity however has led me to give it another try, however this time i am coming armed with... a Firefox plug-in. I wondered if there was a plug-in to allow me to write to my Twitter account directly from FF without having to go to the site, login and all that jazz. Of course there are several. The one i am giving a go to is Twitbin.

It works quite nicely, adding a collapsible sidebar to Firefox and easily allowing you to post to your Twitter feed and see what else is happening on your feed. It actually makes updating your Twitter account quite painless and fast so maybe i will finally use it...

Philosophical debate

I found a flaw with Google Chrome rather early, it supports scrolling down a page with the mouse scroll wheel but not back up!

Anyway time for a philosophical question. If you are viewing a webpage with an animated gif does the gif continue to animate after you have scrolled away from that part of the page? We could consider whether a browser renders an entire page and keep it in memory or just the part being viewed and thus if it is rendered in memory are changes to that page maintained in memory or actioned only when viewed? Or we could consider the question from a philosophical point of view, perhaps a kind of Zen web design. Does a gif animate if no one is around to see it? Does the gif animate or is everything else animating and the gif is constant.